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`The Unique Structure of the Present Great Andamanese: an Overview of the Grammar `The Unique Structure of the Present Great Andamanese: An Overview of the Grammar Abstract Great Andamanese is an isolate and belongs to the sixth language family of India (Abbi 2009). Present-day Great Andamanese (PGA), a koinèized version of the North Great Andamanese languages is a head-marking polysynthetic and agglutinative language with an SOV pattern, and has a very elaborate system for marking inalienability (Abbi 2006, 2010) nested in seven possessive markers designating different body-divisions. These markers are further grammaticalized in the language and appear as proclitics which classify a large number of lexical items as dependent categories. The author proposes that the Great Andamanese conceptualize their world through these interdependencies and hence the grammar of the language encodes this important phenomenon in every grammatical category expressing referential, attributive and predicative meaning. These are very unusual features never reported earlier in grammars of languages of the world and thus, indicate very old structures in the chain of language evolution. 1. Introduction The Andaman Islands are comprised of a cluster of approximately 550 islands, rocks and rocky outcrop running from north to south and located southeast of the Indian sub- continent in the Bay of Bengal. They are separated from the Malay Peninsula by the Andaman Sea , an extension of the Bay of Bengal, and are part of the Union Territory of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands belonging to India (Map 1). Geographically, the Andaman Islands are closer to Myanmar and Indonesia than to mainland India. However, contact between the Andamanese and the populations of the neighboring countries has not been established till date. The capital city of the Andaman Islands is Port Blair, 1 situated in the south of the Islands at a distance of 1255 km from Kolkata and 1190 km from Chennai. There are ten languages in the Great Andamanese family, which can be grouped into three varieties: southern, central and northern. These are: Aka-Bea, Aka-Bale, the 2 southern variety; Aka-Pucikwar [known as Pujjukar in the current spoken language], Aka-Kol, Aka-Kede, Aka-Jowoi, as the central variety; and Aka-Jeru, Aka-Bo, Aka-Kora [known as Khora by the present speakers] and Aka-Cari [known as Sare by the present speakers] a northern variety. Except for Jeru and Sare 1 all Great Andamanese languages are now extinct. Not all languages were mutually intelligible with each other as the languages of the Great Andamanese tribes formed a ‘‘linguistic continuum”, so that each language was closely related to its neighbor on each side but those at the extreme ends of the geographic continuum were mutually unintelligible. Hence, Aka-Cari (Map 2), a North Great Andamanese language, was mutually unintelligible with Aka Bea, the southern variety. The present-day Great Andamanese 2 language is a mixture of four northern varieties 3 with sporadic interferences from the central variety such as Aka Pucikwar. Linguists consider Great Andamanese as a language isolate because no links to any other language family have been established so far. 1 There is one speaker who hails from the background of Sare, however speaks the present form of the Great Andamanese language . 2 I will use the term Present-day Great Andamanese (PGA) for the present form of the language and avoid referring to it by any of the four languages from which it draws its resources so as not to empower one language over the other. It is spoken in the Strait Island and some parts of Port Blair. 3 The last few generations of Great Andamanese speakers are descendents of intermarriages among North Andamanese tribes. The Government of India encouraged this practice in order to preserve their dwindling numbers when the entire population was settled on ‘Strait Island’. 3 Map 2 Courtesy: www.andaman.org Though the PGA is characterized by a mixture of the linguistic features of four to five varieties of Great Andamanese languages, what we notice in today’s Great Andamanese speech is a kind of levelling of different linguistic systems. Perhaps several grammatical inputs have contributed to generate the present language. The linguistic system of present Great Andamanese appears to be close to koine ization (Manoharan 4 1989). As the language is critically endangered, with just eight terminal speakers 4, it is very difficult to say how far it is mixed and what elements are mixed. However, the belief of Siegel (1985:363) that koineization results in the reduction and simplification of grammar is attested to by some areas in the grammar of Great Andamanese; though the verb morphology and the possession constructions are rather complex and elaborate. The research reported here is based on the first-hand field data elicited during the period of 2001-2002 and 2005-2009. Several visits were made to the Strait Island and Port Blair where the speakers of the language reside 5. The latest research by Abbi in 2003 and 2006 show that Great Andamanese constitutes the sixth language family of India. Linguisti c researc h on th e survivin g language s of th e Andama n Islands reveal s littl e commonalit y betwee n Grea t Andamanes e and the languages of the Jaraw a-Ong e group. (Abb i, 2003 , 2006 , 2009). The Jarawa- Onge group has been associated with Austronesian language family (Blevins 2007). Out of the ten varieties that once existed in the Great Andamanese family, we found traces of only four languages, i.e. Sare, Khora, Bo and Jero in today’s speech. The recent deaths of 4 This was the number of fluent speakers when we began our research in the island. There are only five speakers left now. Fortunately, we could interview some of the fluent speakers of the language when they were still alive. Special mention must be made of Jirake, the chief of the Great Andamanese tribe and Nao Jr. his younger brother, and Boa Sr who came from the Bo tribe. More than 50% of the current population of the Great Andamanese tribe consists of children below 14 years of age (See Abbi et al 2007) 5 The research was conducted in two phases. The first one was a pilot survey of the languages of the Andaman Islands supported and funded by the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany. The second phase–research was conducted at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi under the project Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese (VOGA) supported by the Hans Rausing Endangered Language Fund, SOAS, University of London. 5 the last speakers of Khora and Bo have left only Jero and Sare speakers who are not fully conversant with their respective languages but remember isolated words from their native tongues. The demographic scale of these islanders is inversely related to their degree of contact with mainlanders: the longer the contact, the smaller the population. 2 The sound system We discuss in short the sound system of the PGA language in the following pages. Because of the fact that PGA is a moribund language with a few speakers left in the community and the fact that our speakers hail from diverse background, care has been taken to observe and report phonetic variation across speakers. This information will, perhaps, give an idea of phonemic grid of the extinct and dying languages of the Great Andamanese family. 2.1 Vowels PGA has a seven ‐vowel system, as shown in Table 1, and offers a large possibility of combinations in the area of vowel sequences or clusters, as represented in Table 2. We noted a high variation in the inventory of vowels and consonants among the speakers because of ‘koiné’ and the ‘mixed’ nature of the language. Another factor leading to such variation could be the fact that the language is on the verge of extinction and community members do not remember many words and their exact pronunciation, and hence, offer varied sounds for the same word. The indifference of the speakers towards the language could also lead to such variation. Despite such variation, phonemic inventories of vowels and consonants could be arrived at by eliciting minimal pairs for most of the sounds. Where minimal pairs were not available, the judgements of the native speakers about the phonological contrasts were taken into account. 6 Front Central Back Close i u Half close e o Half open ϯ ѐ Open Ϫ Table 1 Vowels of Great Andamanese In the first phase of fieldwork (2001–2002), we recorded the mean mid central vowel [ ђ] in the data. However, subsequent visits to the speech community and the digital recording of the vowel indicated that the language lacks this central vowel. There is only one unrounded back vowel and that is a. The rendering of Hindi words such as bђnao ‘make’, was also realized as banao . There are more archiphonemes in this language than any other language that I have come across. Hence, contrast is neutralized across speakers. For example, we noticed that though e and ε stand in contrast, speakers use them interchangeably in some words. Similar was the situation with back vowels o and ѐ, as well as with o and u, which were in free variation, at times within the speech of the same speaker, despite the fact that the two sounds do offer contrast in minimal pairs. We have tried to capture this variation wherever possible in the dictionary, with the source specified. We could not attest length at the phonemic level. We have specified length where we thought it was important for the pronunciation of the word, especially in the combination of two vowels (see Table 2). Phonetically it has been specified by a colon mark [:] placed after the long vowel.
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